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Publisher's Note: I just received this notice from this radio station about the upcoming program on the Elaine Massacre, an event that reads like a John Grisham novel.

In the morning hours of October 1, 1919, urgent calls went up and down the Mississippi River from the heart of the Arkansas Delta: blacks in Phillips County are rioting. No one seemed to be clear about what had touched them off, but a shoot-out at a church in a hamlet called Hoop Spur in the southern part of the county had left one white man dead and others wounded.

More historians are beginning to write about this tragedy, and Ron's program should be very interesting. I urge you to tune in.

P.S. If you are interested in reading more on this historical incident (once called a "race riot", here is information on a recently written book by an Arkansas historian --

Blood in Their Eyes is a relentless examination of one of the bloodiest American racial repressions of the 20th century. In retelling the story of the Elaine massacres of 1919 with moral fervor and canny reinterpretation of sources, Grif Stockley has written a study of collective barbarism in real time that deepens our knowledge of the psychodynamics of white supremacy.

-— David Levering Lewis, two-time Pulitzer Prize winning author

Meticulously researched and compellingly argued, Blood in Their Eyes is the definitive history of the Elaine, Arkansas, massacre . . . [which] was the bloodiest race war of the Red Summer of 1919. Compounding the violence by rampaging white mobs and army troops was the torture of black survivors. Grif Stockley, a lawyer, has told the whole story, and in doing so, he has deeply enriched our understanding not only of America's violently racist past, but also of the challenges which that history poses for the future.

William M. Tuttle, Jr., author of Daddy's Gone to War: The Second World War in the Lives of America's Children (1993) and Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (2nd ed., 1996)

Awards for Blood in Their Eyes
American Association of State and Local History, 2003, Certificate of Commendation